Check out this video of a Japanese Female Android Mannequin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR0GhdioJKs and also this video of a Shape-Shifting Robot Mannequin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF1qgqDaAt4

Actually the solution to controlling the robots is easy. You put a republican algorithm controlling the right side of the robot and a democratic algorithm controlling the left side --both of which can be turned on simultaneously by remote control. Very quickly you will discover the robot is useless.

imho, what most fail to consider, is the trade-off between freedom and control. Ultimate freedom comes from 0 government, and no systems. Besides laws and cultural restrictions, we are increasingly constrained by massive 'systems'. Credit bureaus and banking which try to analyze you. Automated trading systems which fight for microsecond advantages in prediction. DARPA and NSA monitoring, prediction and attack. The phenomenal expansion of drones (1/3 of all military aircraft now). The medical industry - driven by a tangle of laws, corruption and compute power. The search engines. Network routers. EDA tools even. Just think of all the paradigms upon which compute power and programmed intelligence restrict, manipulate or enhance your lives. Consider that there are many of each, and they compete with each other. They evolve. They are pure greedy algorithms. Their efficiency and intelligence rewarded by success. There are thousands of them. There in only ONE thing you can do to save yourself: Build an ethical AI system now. Get 10,000 engineers to contribute. Get it to monitor and predict end-points of other nascent AI systems.

Well, based on your 10% point, suppose we designed something that had 50% of our full potential and used 100% of this .. that way it would still be 5X better than us :-)
But the real point is that we can already create self-learning artificial neural networks -- and even with simple ones we may understand the theory but we find it hard to work out how they are doing what they are doing...
And we use machines to build better machine sand we use computers to design better computers ...

Respected people...
No matter what you are designing you will still be using your own brain and it is a known fact that you cannot use more than 10 percent of your whole brain simultaneously.How can anything designed by your own brain can exceed the intelligence of the designer?

I am reminded of Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety". ISTR that there was a follow-on story where a survivor of the war (which the humans won because the robots fought with each other) was walking on the surface and kindly reactivated a robot, which then restarted a factory--which, I think, was then nuked (but not from orbit) by the humans--the only way to be sure, I guess.

Max the Magnificent
Hi Nic -- re your comment: "I have spent the last 20 years trying to give a robot enough intelligence to tie its own shoe laces together"...
I bet that is an interesting "conversational starter" when you are at a party and someone asks what you do (grin).
I'm really not into scaremongering (watch for my next blog, which will be on the "12-21-2012 End of the World" garbage) but...
I'm not an expert, but I remember the old AI that was based on purely digital logic and sequential software techniques -- I agree that this is not going to take over the world.
But there are all sorts of things going on with pseudo analog neural networks -- and although quantum computing is in its infancy, think where we might be in 40 years time (remember it's only about 60 years since the first transistor ... and look at us now).
If you'd asked me 20 years ago I would have said that intelligent (self aware) robots (or whatever) were the stuff of science fiction ... now I'm not ashamed to say that I think that we might be closer than we think -- maybe not in my lifetime ... but then again...

I was just talking to a company yesterday that is working on an XBOX kinect type "thing" that will be able to detect motion changes as small as 0.1mm and will be able to perform realtime object detection, 2D to 3D conversion, face recognition, gesture recognition, etc (down to the blink of an eye and detecting the difference between a frown, smile, or smirk...